Electronic Signatures; towards a paperless office

With the advent of technology to put electronic signatures on your document, you may be able to achieve the paperless office that you’ve always wanted. What generally happens is that whenever a document is sent for your approval, you print the document, sign it and re-scan it to send it back. This consumes both unnecessary time and money. The use of electronic signature or Signature sealshelps cut down the useless expenditure.

How to create an electronic signature?

The first thing to do is to make/create the digital image of the signature and there are many ways to do that:

You can use any touch technology based device like your Smartphone or tablet and draw your signature with your fingers using an app like ‘Fountain pen’ or ‘Sketch pad’ and then send it to your laptop or system.

If you don’t have any such device, simply put your signature on a white paper sheet and click an image on it to transfer to your computer.

You could also use MS Paint or Google Docs to draft your signature with mouse pointer. Google Docs is a better option because it generates a transparent image of the signature.

Then there is the option of Live Signature, drawing your signature and clicking “Create Signature” to download the image.

How to use it in documents?

Once the signature image is generated and saved it is easy to use if it is to be used with a Microsoft word file. All you need to do is, open the file, put in the signature picture inline, save it, convert the word file into pdf and send it to your client via email.

But, if the file is in Adobe PDF format, you will have to perform some extra steps to edit the PDF files to insert the signature unless you use Adobe Acrobat which is a pdf editor.

One option is to first convert the PDF file to Microsoft Word file using any of the many free web services to choose from. Once the conversion is done, you can add the image inline, save it and export the document as PDF to prevent any form of editing.

If you want to protect your electronic signature pdf, you need to open the file in PDF Hammer and add password constraint followed by re-exporting the file.

Now if your PDF is a long one with a complex format, using the previous option is not the right the thing to do as conversion from PDF to Microsoft Word documents may change the formatting of the file. In such a case you can:

Use PDF X-Change; in this, you can import the image of the signature in the Stamps Palette and then open the file of PDF format which you wish to sign and click ‘Comment & Markup’ under ‘Tools’ tab to insert the signature. After this it can be exported as PDF again and no formatting is lost.

Author Bio:- The writer gives us the necessary information about electronic signatures pdfwhich otherwise is taken to be a very tough thing. The writer explains it in a very simple and easy to understand way.